It shouldn’t come as a surprise that, as an author of erotic romance, I’m wildly interested in everything regarding sex and eroticism. And as a person fascinated by the sciences, one question has popped into my mind quite often: why are women even capable of orgasming?

Let’s face it, folks, practically speaking, the female orgasm serves no purpose. Sure, it feels amazing, and it certainly makes sex a lot more enjoyable, but essentially it doesn’t play an important role in the reproductive process like the male orgasm. If it did, we might not face a history of female sexual repression in almost every culture. Female enjoyment isn’t a requirement for sex to be ‘successful’ (so to speak), therefore female sexual pleasure has been vilified in most cultures for millennia.

As often, uplifting news come from the world of science. In a recently published article, two researchers postulate, based on observations of other mammals, that the female orgasm might have once played a crucial role in procreation.

In animals such as cats and rabbits, the female orgasm is required in order to trigger ovulation. The study finds that humans still have the same neural pathways as these animals, indicating that once, in our distant ancestors, the female orgasm was also required for ovulation to even happen. In other words, in order to become pregnant, the woman had to have had an orgasm.

But evolution unfortunately can be cruel sometimes. A mutation happened, and spontaneous ovulation (as we still experience it today) proved to be a lot more effective from an evolutionary standpoint, rendering the purpose of the female orgasm mute.

Apparently, ovulation requiring an orgasm failed more often than not, otherwise both variants would have persisted. Spontaneous ovulation does seem to have clear advantages from the standpoint of procreation.

Or, in layman’s terms, there was once a time where the guy had to be good enough to get you off in the sack in order to earn the privilege to produce offspring with you.

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